Israeli Settlers Attack Monastery

The Catholic Church condemned the so-called “price-tag” attack against a Christian monastery on Tuesday, with high-ranking church offices denouncing the “teaching of contempt” against Christians prevalent in Israeli society.

Earlier Tuesday, the door of a Christian monastery in Latrun, the Abbaye de Notre-Dame de Sept-Douleurs, near Jerusalem, was set on fire on morning and anti-Christian slogans were found spray-painted on the monastery’s walls.

The arson and graffiti are suspected to be a “price tag” attack, following the recent evacuation of Migron, a settlement outpost in the West Bank.

Monks residing at the monastery noticed the burning door on Tuesday morning, and called police after extinguishing the flames. Graffiti sprayed on the monastery walls included the words “Migron,” and “Jesus is a monkey.”

In a statement released later in the day and signed, among others, by the Latin Patriarch for Jerusalem Fouad Twal and Gerogio Lingua, Apostolic Nuncio for Jordan, and former Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, the Catholic Church severely condemned the attack, saying it was the results of an Israeli tendency to scapegoat Christians.

PM Netanyahu strongly condemned the attack. He should make every effort to arrest these disgusting bigots.

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45 Responses to Israeli Settlers Attack Monastery

I’m glad this was mentioned; I was tempted to say something about it myself. I think this kind of thing is a nearly inevitable product of Netanyahu’s present coalition, the logical extension to a state-sponsored ethnonationalism like nothing else in the democratic world.

What a lot of American Christians fail to grasp is that outside of the states relations between Christians and Jews is a lot more complicated and sometimes (historically at least) outright hostile. That’s why I reject the notion of this notion of a shared Judeo-Christian heritage as an evangelical fantasy. Judaism and Christianity are two different religions that are incompatible with each other. That doesn’t mean that Christians and Jews can’t live in peace, but it does mean that a Jew is a Jew and a Christian is a Christian and in the politically charged atmosphere that is the occupied territories of Palestine Israeli settlers defacing a monastery is not surprising at all. Good for Netanyahu condemning such things, but such words are empty as long as his government stands by the illegal occupation and the settlement of non native Jews on Palestinian land.

Ugh, this is a powderkeg waiting to blow up. They need to deal with this quietly and not allow any grandstanding on either side. You make martyrs of these guys and it can only get worse. Making a palestinian israeli conflict also into a jewish christian one is bad indeed.

Considering the attitude of the Vatican towards Israel, I’m amazed that any monasteries are even left. I would have expected the Israelis to have expelled the monks decades ago and turned the Christian holy sites over to Baptists.

Maybe one day it will become clear to you that in the end this is not simply the work of some isolated bigots, but that Israeli society has been corrupted possibly beyond repair by the Occupation, which in turn has been enabled by Israel’s American supporters.

One has to pay close attention to the MSM in the West to get even an inkling of this type of news emanating from Israel, for reasons I won’t go into here. Suffice to say Haaretz is one of the few channels of unrefined reality from that part of the world. As you can see here, Israeli reality doesn’t exactly portray Judaism in a favorable light.

PM Netanyahu strongly condemned the attack. He should make every effort to arrest these disgusting bigots.

Ah, but will he? Rod, have you ever heard of Philoumenos of Jacob’s Well? He was an Orthodox Christian monk murdered by Zionist terrorists in 1979. The crime has never been solved, no arrests have ever been made.

Five will get ya ten that the Israelis do zilch about this. The ignorant, gullible megachurch proles in the US who subscribe to “Christian” Zionism have scarcely shown concern for their Arab Christian brethren before; their superstitious beliefs regarding the alleged Chosen People and Holy Land (e.g. their woeful misinterpretation of Genesis 12:3) will prevent these latter-day pharisees from seeking justice for this incident.

You have 14 responses. Any society has a certain amount of low-grade crime (including vandalism), most any society has intramural rivalries and resentments, and just about any society will have unsolved homicides over a period of thirty three years. Nine of your respondents, including the former editor of this publication, fancy this is a demonstration that the whole state and society are corrupt in some odd or unusual way. Again, Rod, choice crowd you hang with.

Something conservatives should bear in mind is that the same religious bigotry underpins the increasingly violent racism displayed against immigrants – African refugees in Israel tending to be from traditionally Christian countries like Eritrea.

It also comes as no surprise that supposedly left-wing Arab muslim politicians take much the same position on these alien infiltrators (a difficult concept in a country founded by refugees whose hereditary enemies too cling to their refugee status generation after generation) as their right-wing enemies.

The Assembly of Catholic Bishops of the Holy Land,
“Sadly, what happened in Latroun is only another in a long series of attacks against Christians and their places of worship. What is going on in Israeli society today that permits Christians to be scapegoat and targeted by these acts of violence?”

Why be surprised? We should give thanks for the fact that religious Christians and religious Jews do get along at all.

The rabbis are the direct intellectual and spiritual heirs of The Pharisees, and we know what they and Jesus thought about each other. I wish it weren’t so, but pretending it’s otherwise won’t change a thing.

May I respectfully suggest to my Christian friends here that equating Israel and Zionists with all Jews is like equating New Yorkers with all Americans. It is a pathway toward bigotry and hate, not a path to solving the problems of the Mideast, or America, or the World.

I have no doubt there are many fine Christians who disagree with what other Christians do in the name of their faith, and the same applies to Muslims as well. But just as you would not condemn all Christians for the failings of a few, you would not

There are many American Jews, myself among them, who are disgusted, upset, and saddened by the things done by many of our more extremist brethren in Israel, and are frustrated by the intolerance that is out of sync with what we are taught in our homes and our synagogues. We are working (and praying) in an effort to make Israel a better state. I would hope Christians, Muslims, and Jews could join together in that effort.

There are many American Jews, myself among them, who are disgusted, upset, and saddened by the things done by many of our more extremist brethren in Israel, and are frustrated by the intolerance that is out of sync with what we are taught in our homes and our synagogues. We are working (and praying) in an effort to make Israel a better state. I would hope Christians, Muslims, and Jews could join together in that effort.

Thanks for saying that. I know that there are many, many Israelis who are disgusted by the extremist settlers, and who say so openly. I wish the Netanyahu government would take a harder line against those fanatics, who are objectively harming Israel’s interests.

The situation of Christians in the Holy Land is both awful and awfully underreported. But jumping to anti-Zionism doesn’t strike me as an answer. The Jewish people of Israel are there and they are staying. We Christians should protest these things, but we should also pray for that wonderful, gifted, chosen nation from which Jesus sprung that those Jews living in Israel may succeed in rooting out these sorts of attitudes, which do their State no good.

In a normal functioning society you don’t need the prime minister to get involved in order for the police to do their jobs.” His model must be Obama in the Trayvon Martin incident — or the ‘Skip’ Gates incident.

So, you’re concerned that the PM may be asked a question about it at a press conference?

If you look at the comments section of the Haaretz article it’s obvious that there are Israelis who are upset about this and the other pricetagging incidents and the failure of the Israeli police to put an end to it.

Of course you can also see posters there and other places this story was reported implying that due to its history of anti-semitism (and/or child abuse) the Church deserves this sort of treatment.

Art Deco if people did the same thing to a synagogue in Estonia would it not be right to point out that Estonians need to be concerned about an undercurrent of racism/anti-antisemitism in their culture? What makes Israel different?

“As a child, Elias Chacour lived in a small Palestinian village in Galilee. The townspeople were proud of their ancient Christian heritage and lived at peace with their Jewish neighbors. But in 1948 and ’49 their idyllic lifestyle was swept away as tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed and nearly one million forced into refugee camps.”

“May I respectfully suggest to my Christian friends here that equating Israel and Zionists with all Jews is like equating New Yorkers with all Americans. It is a pathway toward bigotry and hate, not a path to solving the problems of the Mideast, or America, or the World.”

Who here has actually done that? Actually, what folks have suggested is that there is something problematic going on within Israeli civil society that leads to an unjust situation, particularly with respect to Christians. It does not follow from such concerns that “all Jews” are problematic, etc.

Peter,
Don’t you ever watch Q & A with the UK PM? He gets asked questions all the time that in the US would be bizarre asked of Obama. For instance, there was a spate of murders in London, and the PM (Blair at the time, I think) was asked about it. Remember, Israel like the UK is a very small nation. Items handled at the city or state/province level in larger nations are addressed at higher levels in smaller nations as a result.

Art Deco, would you consider the KKK burning crosses on the lawn of a black family a low grade crime? Did not such instances, which were often not prosecuted locally demonstrate a problem with the civil society of that state and locality where such crimes were committed?

The settlements may have been express government policy at one time in an attempt to get facts on the ground. I’m not so sure it is today. Having far flung “settlements” (usually mobile home parks frequently placed amongst a hostile population (most of us would be if someone decided to occupy our town) for access to water) makes defending these settlements awkward and expensive. They aggravate the Palestinians living in Palestine, the Palestinian Israelis living in Israel, many Israelis living in Israel, and the international community. Most Israeli youngsters serve in the military, do you really think that a parent living in Tel Aviv wants their child to die protecting a settlement that’s not supposed to be there?

This kind of harassment goes on against the Muslim community, too. Is it only wrong when it’s done against Christians?

I’m trying to figure out if you’re responding to my comment or the words of someone else. My comment was a critique of Israel’s settlement policy–which more or less still exists–and the incongruous notion that the actions being excoriated here are radically anomalous within Israeli culture. In other words, I think we agree?

Anyway, lynchings were rare in the American South, the land of my youth. Many Southerners opposed lynching in word and deed. Does that mean that the few lynchings that did happen were thus not indicative of an officially-sanctioned culture of racism? I hope that’s a rhetorical question.

3,000+ lynchings of black people over approximately 70 years – I’m excluding other groups since Wikipedia’s article on lynching doesn’t have the stats for other people of color and the white proportion of lynching victims dropped precipitously after 1890 – is not so rare, especially for such a spectacular crime.

The fact that (a) more than a few lynchings were treated as public spectacle, (b) lynching memorabilia (postcards, photos) was freely sold, and (c) few perpetrators were ever prosecuted and fewer still convicted does indicate to me that lynching was in fact “indicative of an officially-sanctioned culture of racism” in a significant portion of the South, especially, per Wikipedia, in the five states of the Cotton Belt.

Art Deco, would you consider the KKK burning crosses on the lawn of a black family a low grade crime? Did not such instances, which were often not prosecuted locally demonstrate a problem with the civil society of that state and locality where such crimes were committed?

1. Graffiti is treated as a class A misdemeanor in New York.

2. Setting the door on fire could, were the prosecutor so inclined hereabouts, get them is some serious hot water. The prosecutor would have an option to seek an indictment for 3d degree arson, which is a class c felony.

3. Setting a bonfire on someone’s lawn would be treated as a class A misdemeanor if there was not damage to any structure or vehicle on the property.

4. Setting a cross on fire is indicative of the dispositions of the people who do it. It may or may not be indicative of trouble in the larger society. Depends on where it happens.

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You studiously refuse to notice that we have a summary news report of a disagreeable crime in a part of the world where certain sorts of security problems and intercommunal violence is unremarkable. No perpetrators are identified, yet a mess of people here go about issuing denunciations of Jewish residents of the West Bank. Most of the responses were variations on a theme of ‘Israel sucks’.

1. Such a response is unreasonable;
2. It is malicious.

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Dreher might benefit from asking himself why his comboxes are populated by the malicious and unreasonable. (Leavened with the sort of brainwave who would categorize my suggestion as ‘guilt by association).

Rod is no more being antisemtic by denouncing the profaning of a Christian site in Israel than he was being pro-Putin by denouncing the profaning of a Christian site in Russia by Pussy Riot. He’s being consistent and that’s to his credit.

Rod, what do you think Netanyahu is not doing that he actually should be doing as far as these crimes are concerned? As far as I’ve read, Netanyahu is doing all he can to bring such Zionist extremists to justice. If I’m wrong about this, then please provide specific, objective evidence that Netanyahu is dragging his feet on criminal acts of vandalism against Christians.

Radicalism and mindless hatred doesn’t distinguish faith or ideology. Hate fueled, brain-washed segments plague many – if not most – world religions. Anwar Sadat-killed by radical Egyptian Muslims. Itzhak Rabin – killed by ultra-orthodox Israeli Jew Ygal Amir.Protestants and Catholics have killed each other in Great Britain – and other places too.Radicalism is our enemy. If there’s one reason GOD put us on this planet, it’s because we must learn to get along and respect each other despite our differences. PEACE.